Project Objectives
- Develop an integrated hardware–software platform for automated welfare assessment.
- Combine 3D gait analysis, grimace scoring and behavioural motif analysis.
- Generate robust training datasets across multiple collaborating laboratories.
- Benchmark automated methods against standard cageside assessments.
- Produce an open‑source system transferable across research institutions.
3Rs Impact
- Detects pain and distress more sensitively than observation by eye, and without the variation that comes from different people scoring the same animal.
- Picks up welfare decline earlier, which means intervening sooner and reaching a humane endpoint before an animal has suffered more than the study requires.
- Gives an evidence base for pain relief and post-operative care, so decisions rest on measurements rather than on judgement alone.
- More precise measurements mean smaller differences can be detected, so studies can potentially use fewer animals.
- Produces a standard, transferable way of monitoring welfare that other laboratories can adopt.
Background
Mice hide pain. It is an instinct in a prey animal, and it works against anyone trying to judge how a laboratory mouse is doing. The standard check is for someone to look at the animal in its cage and score what they see. This misses subtle signs, and two people watching the same mouse may score it differently.
Software for tracking animals has improved substantially. Pose estimation, which works out the position of an animal’s body from video, now allows changes in gait, facial expression and short bursts of behaviour to be detected automatically.
This project brings those methods together in a single chamber resembling a home cage, fitted with infrared cameras and three-dimensional tracking. Within it, the system measures posture and gait, scores facial expressions for signs of pain, and records patterns of behaviour lasting less than a second.
The aim is an objective, consistent assessment of how a mouse is doing. That would make results easier to compare between laboratories, allow welfare problems to be caught earlier, and give researchers firmer ground for deciding on pain relief and on when to end an experiment.
